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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

CeBit2010: The Ribbonator

OpenOffice.org

Phew, last week I attended the CeBit and I was greeted with "Finally, the Ribbonator is there!". Jacqueline, one of the German project co-leads, told me how glad she was that somebody of the UX team arrived to manage the Renaissance related questions. Many people had already asked for the changes to come in OpenOffice.org - being driven by interest or pure fear ;-) To me, it is still surprising how many people believe in the press coverage that OpenOffice.org intends to "copy and paste" a competitor product ... ts ts ts. It seems that the presentation I did last year was less sucessful ...

However, I was glad to join the German team on the fourth day of the conference. Team also refers to some friends who are usually present at the trade fairs: Sun/Oracle, SCAI, Teamdrive, FOSS Group, ... And surely, there have been many questions concerning Renaissance, but I was able to answer many of the questions with the help of the video coverage that sheds some light on the current development (e.g here or here). But also the current printer improvements have been interesting to some of the attendees. Finally, everybody agreed that this will bring OpenOffice.org a step forward :-)

Forward? Fast forward! There have also been other great meetings / discussions / events ... Jacqueline was so kind to sum it up in her (German) CeBit 2010 Summary. Really worth to check it out! Personally, I would like to thank all people involved ... especially Liz and Rosana who had been sick and therefore weren't able to attend :-(

Lotus Symphony

The IBM stand - mmh, it covered nearly on fourth of the exhibition hall - was not too far away from the OpenOffice.org booth. Since we have been asked to provide some feedback on Symphony (which is based on OpenOffice.org), I took the chance to check it out. So, if you want to know what I encountered in the short period of time ... have a look at the mail on the UX discuss mailing list.

Although I was the nit-picker, I got a "stress ball" which will be more than helpful to cope with some current OpenOffice.org topics :-)

KDE KOffice

Another cool thing was the in-depth discussion with the people from KOffice who were also present at the CeBit. The talk started with some questions concerning our change tracking system, but since I lack the knowledge how it is implemented, I was able to slowly change the discussion towards comments ;-)

To be honest, they seemed to be very interested in what we achieved since they are currently working on bringing both change tracking and comments into KWord, the KOffice word processor. Thus, I presented them what we documented in the wiki during our great Notes2 time. Maybe I paid a bit too much attention to detail, but I was more than happy that somebody might pick up some thoughts, since many (!) of the detailed feature proposals and rough ideas still have to find their way into OpenOffice.org. But also the discussion of basic behavioral questions brought some lengthly Notes2 I-Team discussions to mind :-)

Finally, attending the CeBit was much fun - although the other community members and I had only a few hours to share ...